With the opportunity to travel to Germany last year, I couldn't help but include some time for geotourism in my schedule. Thankfully, due to the ever-present nature of geology on the solid earth, there is rarely a location without some feature of interest to explore. I present the following highlights in reverse-chronological order, as a sort of stratigraphic column tour.

Before the awe-inspiring photograph of the Pale Blue Dot, and the more recent image of an evening “star” in the Martian sky, the crew of Apollo 17 captured our home world in The Blue Marble (AS17-148-22727). Possibly the most reproduced photograph in human history, this piece of “viz art” I created using Tableau Public adds... Continue Reading →

The Moon has an impermanent hold on its tenuous atmosphere. Its relatively weak gravity (1.62 m s-2), one sixth of Earth’s, struggles to hold onto the gas species that do exist in its exosphere environment. Though the Moon readily contributes gasses to its exosphere, external forces strip these away into a streaming tail. Fine dust... Continue Reading →

Currently reading Out of this World: The New Field of Space Architecture by A. Scott Howe and Brent Sherwood and wanted to reproduce a chart that they made: I included more instances of historic inhabited spacecraft than the original chart (above), as well as inhabited spacecraft that were docked to each other, combining their habitable... Continue Reading →

I recently discovered this project, JanusVR, yet another iteration of attempting to develop a 3D web.Using a markup language that sits easily within HTML, (also with my familiarity of the similar X3D and VRML) it was easy enough to write a simple virtual space and populate it with some objects. Editing within the JanusVR browser... Continue Reading →

Download these STL files for Phobos and Deimos and 3D print your own Martian moons! Point cloud shape model of the largest of Mars' two moons, Phobos. This was made using data from the NASA Planetary Data System, plotted using R and the rgl library. (see my code here on Github) The enveloping red sphere... Continue Reading →

What do watersheds, urban light pollution, and the 2012 presidential election have to do with each other? I don't know, but I made a map. I've combined these three disparate geospatial data layers to produce the image below of the lower 48 states (sorry Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories/insular areas of the... Continue Reading →